Leave Behind Time
by bethemoon
Summary: But Susan has worked too hard to forget the world that wouldn't have her. Susan, post-PC, pre-LB.


**Title**: Leave Behind Time  
**Fandom**: Narnia, after Prince Caspian and through to after VotDT.  
**Character(s):** The four Pevensies.  
**Rating**: PG  
**Notes**: I feel like this is somehow unfinished. This doesn't go through to The Last Battle because I'm not sure I accept that as canon yet. :/ Credit for inspiration goes to turkeyish, lassiterfics, and zempasuchil on LJ, all of whom are lovely writers. Also the song "Red" by Elbow, which I found through bedlamsbard, also on LJ.

Some days Susan thinks she is insane. She writes to Edmund one winter day, _Insanity is not necessarily the lack of an ability to logically reason, but logical reasoning that leads to a conclusion the person then rejects_.

When his reply comes, she purses her lips and scowls at the letter in her hand._ But sometimes logical reasoning doesn't work, because magic defies all attempts at logic being applied to it. _

---------------------

Peter writes her one day, _Have you ever wondered why everyone says time goes in a line?_

She writes back, _Why would I? They don't know any better._

They both know that time is unpredictable, and can travel in circles as well when it likes (Lucy had her third thirteenth birthday party only a few months ago).

--------------------

_Have you ever thought of how much like magic time is? _Edmund writes her that summer while she's in America. _You can't really apply logical reasoning to it._

_Don't be ridiculous, _she replies, _you can apply logical reasoning to everything._

_Not lions, _Edmund writes back with confidence, as though it's their own private joke. Susan crumples up the letter and tosses it onto her bed.

Later, she smooths it out and reads the rest of the mundane news it contains. There's a postscript at the bottom.

_Lu and I went back there. Aslan says it was our last. Eustace went with us, he's quite changed from it. Can't wait for you to get home. All our love, and Caspian sends his regards._

---------------------

Once, she and Peter had joked that she was water, fluid and easy to change.

They don't joke about it anymore, because it looks like she is. Only she knows the way every inch of her protests against her new surroundings, and how she hates the way the sun is harsher here in the world she doesn't love.

When she and Peter meet for lunch, she can practically see the scorch marks he leaves on the world around him as he tries to fit into it. She is more gentle in her assimilation, and Peter mentions it when he leaves, with a sort of sad smile.

"You always were the Gentle," he adds, and it makes her angry, this assumption that she's just giving up all that they had, turning her back on it without a reason.

"I won't pine for a land that refused to have me!" she snaps, and it's the last time Peter hears her speak of Narnia.

--------------------------

Edmund's the only one of the others who really understands, who forgives her.

_It's not that I don't like Narnia, _she writes him. _Or that I hate all of you. It's just that I can't ever go back there, and you can't look forward and back at the same time. _

_I know, _he answers. _But that doesn't mean you have to give up on it either. You can keep it in the corner of your mind, because it is a part of you now. It's a part of us all._

_Why are you able to forgive me, _she writes him once, _when none of the others can?_

_You forgave me once,_ his answer comes immediately, scrawled earnestly across a page, _and I was more of a traitor than you are._

And she knows that though she doesn't think of herself as a traitor, the others do, and Peter and Lucy don't see it quite as Edmund does.

----------------------------

_Sometimes the only way to really understand things is to step back and view them subjectively, _she writes to Edmund. _And to do that, you have to let go of them first._

She receives his reply two days later. _I think, _he writes, and she can tell from the way his handwriting is firmer and more sloping that he concentrated on these lines, _that some things are better viewed from within, intimately, as it were. Love, for instance, cannot be viewed objectively because that kills everything it stands for._

_Is that what we held for Narnia? _she writes back. _Love? And what did Narnia think of us? And Aslan? We were just pawns for him, a convenient quartet coming through the Professor's wardrobe to save his pet country. _

Edmund is still concentrating on his writing when he replies. _Whatever we were to Aslan, to Narnia we were their Kings and Queens. And we loved them and they loved us. _

He breaks his paragraph there, and when he resumes the ink on the page is even blacker, like lines of death. _Peter is burning himself and everyone around him to ashes. The sort of damage he carries with him always doesn't come from fairytales, Susan. You know that as well as I do._

Susan doesn't answer that letter for a month, and when she does she writes only of the last dance she went to. She can imagine Edmund's face crumpling when he reads it, the way he'll probably toss it on the floor in frustration.

----------------------------

_Have you ever wondered why everyone says time is a straight line? _Lucy writes Susan.

_No, but it's probably because it's true, _Susan writes back. _Peter and Edmund hold some interesting theories on it, perhaps you should ask them. I'm not that good at philosophizing._

She had been, once.

------------------------

Peter still leaves scorch marks on the world around him, even on Susan sometimes, and Edmund seems to pass almost sideways through the world, and Lucy sometimes looks like she can walk through everything and straight into a beyond that shouldn't exist, but Susan has worked too hard to forget the world that wouldn't have her.

So she moves solidly through life, and feels that she has left behind the grace she used to hold, but if she has, she has also left behind the scars.


End file.
